She was all wrong. You know that thing that happens when you see something your brain cannot comprehend? If it’s completely new or at a weird angle, it takes a while to really see it. And just for a microsecond your brain tries old familiar images until you really see it for what it is. The woman, on the other hand defied such explanation. My taxi was pulling into the airport. She was walking on the roundabout passing the taxi. It was her face that caught my attention. Her head was turned at an impossible direction, way past her shoulders. Turning her head back, eyes wide open, chin elongated like those caricatures of witches in the old cartoons.
I have had a similar experience before. I had called for takeaway food service when I was crashing at my niece’s apartment in Malaysia. It was late evening when I opened the door for the delivery guy. Despite my medical background I was startled. His chin was elongated so much that it reached almost the center of his chest, deviated to one side. His mouth pulled down along with it, round and pulled open. He was quite young too. It was a tumor, probably been there for many years. I thanked him , he motioned his thanks and he left. I mentioned it to my niece, and we talked about it a bit, about how inspiring it was for him to be out there making a living. It was sad that he could not afford treatment or maybe he was beyond treatment.
This woman though defied such explanation. When I said she was all wrong I meant she was wrong everywhere. It was not just her head. Her body was thin and lanky, her slim clothes still loose on her body. Her gait was impossibly long , he knees bent. Her posture leaning back as she walked, her arms hanging directly below her shoulders. Her small handbag almost comically waving in the wind. It certainly wasn’t someone on stilts. An illogical sight, I just happened to see on an otherwise mundane trip to the airport.
One of my friends once asked me. About seeing something that he couldn’t explain once. He had gone to the kitchen at night for some water. It was night and right there on the floor he sees wet footsteps. They were appearing and reappearing as if an invisible person who had stepped in water was walking. If that wasn’t strange enough the steps went up to the wall, climbed up for a few steps then just disappeared altogether. He stood, too perplexed to be scared. Promptly forgetting his thirst he went back. This wasn’t a dream, this was real. He finished the story with the question, am I crazy?. It just happened once, and it was many years ago he said. I assured him that he was not. There was a criterion for acute psychosis and that certainly didn’t fit.
‘Then what could explain that?. I know what I saw’, he told me.
‘I guess… it’s just one of those things that happen, that we can’t explain. I mean that weeping statue of the Virgin Mary in some Indian state turned out to be some leaky plumbing. It’s almost always some mundane explanation. A trick of the light, a shadow, a sleepy, disoriented person. Don’t worry about it’ , I reassured him again.
I stuck my head out of the taxi, following the woman all the way till she disappeared from view. Some genetic defect?, my brain desperately tried to reason it out. I have seen extreme conditions in the hospital, but I’d be lying if I say I’m used to it. Once an elder lady consulted for constipation after twenty years of avoiding hospitals. She had a uterine tumor the size of a medicine ball. My head of department and a senior professor had to wrestle it out in surgery, pushing and pulling back and forth. They had to store it in a bucket. She looked so deflated after the surgery.
It’s just a woman with a genetic condition. I kept telling myself. She had smiled at me. She knew I was staring, it felt like she enjoyed my confusion. She had kept eye contact till my taxi turned the corner. It’s just one of those things that you can’t explain huh.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”
Albert Einstein
The old man and the books 